Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792 at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, the eldest son of a wealthy landowner and member of Parliament. At school he was bullied and unhappy, and he went on to Eton College. In 1811 he was expelled from University College, Oxford, for publishing a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism. That year he eloped with sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook. He wrote the long poem Queen Mab. In 1814 he left Harriet and went abroad with Mary Godwin, daughter of the philosopher William Godwin, whom he married in 1816 after Harriet's death. In 1816 they spent a summer near Geneva with Lord Byron, during which Mary began Frankenstein. From 1818 the Shelleys lived in Italy, where he wrote many of his greatest works, including the sonnet 'Ozymandias' (1818), about a broken statue of a forgotten king in the desert, 'Ode to the West Wind', 'To a Skylark', the verse drama Prometheus Unbound and the essay A Defence of Poetry. In 1822, at 29, he drowned when his sailing boat sank in a storm off the coast of Italy.

Percy Bysshe Shelley is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Known at school as 'Shelley the Atheist'; his biographer describes his views as a pantheism that he and others called atheism. Source: Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900) (via Wikisource)